Layering Color and Texture in Procreate

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman and I've got a new procreate class just for you. In this class, I'll be walking you through my process of creating bold, colorful illustrations in the procreate app on your iPad. You'll learn about my favorite brushes I used to build up texture, how I layer color for added interest, and how I use blending modes to amp up the boldness of my illustrations. I'll take you step-by-step through my process of this cactus illustration. By the end of class, you'll be ready to start layering color and texture in your own beautiful procreate illustrations. Grab your iPad and let's get started layering color and texture in procreate. 2. Quick Sketches: We're going to start out today by doing some quick sketches but before we do that, I just wanted to go over a couple of things with you. One of the first things that I want to talk about is if you are new to Procreate, if you've never used it before or if you have used procreate but you're not super comfortable with it, this may not be the best class to start with. You might want to take my Procreate Basics class, which is all about keeping a digital sketchbook on your iPad and it's going to walk you through just more of the basic things like setting up Canvases, organizing your gallery, brushes, all that fun stuff. This class is going to assume that you've already got at least a basic level of knowledge. You just want to make sure that you're not going to make it more complicated on yourself if you've never used Procreate before. The other thing that I want to talk about is how to choose a Canvas size. This is something that, obviously if you're working for a client, they're going to give you a canvas size. You're going to know what you need to do but if it's just something that you're working on personally, maybe you're going to add it to your licensing portfolio. Maybe it's a greeting card or a surface pattern design or something like that and you're kind of just guessing as to what size it might need to be, especially because you don't always know which of your artwork is going to be used for. If you're licensing your artwork, it could be used for all sorts of things and you really need to make sure that you're creating work that's large enough that it can be used, but not so large that it is going to cause problems when it comes to layers and procreate. My rule of thumb is that if I don't know how big I need to make a piece of art. Or if I'm just doing personal stuff or portfolio stuff, I usually try to work bigger than I need to. If I'm working on something that I'm intending to be used as a greeting card. The general size for a greeting card is five by seven inches. I usually work at double-dot size. Like I said, you need to have some flexibility with your final art just because you don't know what products your work is going to be featured on. If I'm illustrating for greeting cards, I still want the flexibility to have my R on wall art or whatever else I might be using it for. The first thing that you need to think of is going to be your intended end use. Even if you don't have a client and you're just doing personal work, you probably have some sort of idea. Whatever size you think the final product is going to be, I would say at least double it. You can go even bigger if you want to, it's just going to depend on how you work in procreate and how many layers you need. I like to use a lot of layers, so I have a lot of options when I'm editing my work in Photoshop later. I can only work a certain size because the number of layers you have in procreate is based on the size of your Canvas. If you have a bigger Canvas, you have less layers and that's sometimes an issue for me. If I'm not sure about size, I'm generally going to work at either 12 by 12 inches or 10 by 14 inches at at least 300 DPI and so far that served me well. I haven't run into a situation where my work wasn't big enough. I know other people are working on larger and procreate, which is also fine. I said, you just have to find what works for you. Usually 10 by 14 inches at 300 DPI gives me, I want to say like 14 or 15 layers, which is a challenge for someone who sometimes works in hundreds of layers in Photoshop, which is overkill, don't do that. But it works and I found out how to make it work for me. That said, for this, I'm just going with my 10 by 14 inch Canvas at 300 DPI. If I wanted to do a greeting card or a piece of wall art or something. It's a large enough size and I can adjust everything if I need to, because I'm going to have everything on layers, which we'll get to later. I have got pulled up here, my Canvas, and then I've got Pinterest pinned over here to the side. I've got a succulents and cacti board over here that I just want to show you guys if I can pull it over, there it is. You guys will be able to access this under the "Your Project" link on Skillshare and then I have this included in your project PDF. It will just be a link where you can go to this pin board and you can see all of the succulents and cactuses that I've penned so you can get some inspiration. Let's talk about our cactus garden. The reason that I chose a cactus garden for this project is because cacti and succulents are constructed in simple shapes. That's going to make it easier to learn the techniques here and then once you've got the techniques down, you can move on to more complex work. That means that if you're new to procreate, give you a really symbol. Maybe you're just going to draw a couple little things of prickly pair with maybe a flower on it. If you're more advanced or as you work along and become more advanced, you can do something that has a lot more detail in it. You can be inspired by anything. The other reason that I wanted to pick a cactus garden is, obviously simple shapes. Those simple shapes are going to make it super easy to just be playful and to experiment and not feel like you have a ton of pressure. That's how I like to work when I'm learning new things. I like to start simple and then work up to something more complex. That's what you should do too. I know when we think of cactus garden, like we're like, oh gosh, that's just so green. Like why is it so green? It's going to be so boring, but it's really not. The cool thing is if you look at this inspiration, you can do like an outdoor sort of setting. You can do something like this where you have the cute little cacti and some tea cups or like any sort of vessels and pots. You'll also notice that a lot of cacti also blooms. You have these really pretty blossoms that are like peachy colored in orange, pink, and yellow. Then the cacti themselves actually have like some other colors within them and of course we don't have to be true to nature. We can make those whatever color we want to and whatever color we feel like. I think this is going to be a fun project. I think this is going to be a really fun way for you to start learning about texture and Procreate and for me to show you how I work. Let's go ahead. I'm just going to slide this guy back over here and then I'm just going to go back to Procreate. I'm just going to do some quick sketch studies of my cacti. If you've taken any matter classes, you know, I love doing some quick studies before I really get started. It helps me warm up and helps me kind of get a feel for the thing that I am drawing. For my sketching in Procreate, I'm almost always using the 6B pencil brush, which you can find under the sketching heading on your brushes. It is just one of my favorite brushes to use. It feels so much like a real pencil. It's awesome. I'm just going to zoom in here. All I'm doing right now is I'm just going to make some little scribbling marks. Just going to work out the shapes. Then I'm also just going to be thinking about the bigger piece of art that I'm going to be working on and how these cactus shapes can work together. I'm going to have that in mind as I am working on this [MUSIC]. All right, so I've got a nice page of cactus doodles right now. I'm going to go ahead and swipe this out of the way so we can have our entire Procreate screen to work with and sort of zoom in. Basically, all I've done here is just do some super scribbly rough sketches of shapes that I liked and maybe like flower ideas that I liked and like the outdoor cactus garden, I really like these little rocks. I think that'll be a fun way to add some color. Then I've done a couple here with little pots just in case when I work on my final piece, maybe I want to vary it a little bit. Again, just trying to get an idea here. This is just going to be when I'm working on the piece, it's not going to be super realistic, so I'm not a super fast about all the details. If I was doing something that was more highly realistic, I would spend more time working on this little quick sketch studies portion. I would definitely just pay more attention to detail instead of just trying to get general shapes and just think of the layout that I'm going to do. I'm not necessarily going to use these. It's just a good warm-up and just a good way to get myself thinking about the shapes that are involved here. In the next video, I'm going to rough sketch my piece and then we'll work on adding some color after that, it's going to be fun. 3. Rough Sketch: In this video, I'm going to be working on my rough sketch for my cactus garden illustration. You can see here I've got all of my studies, my little rough sketch studies that I did. I'm actually just going to do my rough sketch on the same document. I don't necessarily need to keep this sketch, so I might end up deleting this layer at some point if I find out that I don't have enough layers. But for now I'm just going to go to my layers. I'm just going to turn this one off, and then I'm going to make a new layer, and I'm going to sketch on the new layer. I'm just going to go ahead and make sure I've got my 6B pencil brush selected. Usually with this format with like the portrait layout, I would have my iPad turned to the other way because that's more comfortable for me. But because I'm filming this, I want to make sure that the iPad is taking as much of the screen as possible, so you guys can see what's going on. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to start by roughly blocking in some shapes and some layout, and then I'm just going to add some more detail, until I'm happy with the result and I'm ready to move on. Now, I'm a pretty rough sketcher. I always think it's because I work digitally, that I just don't like to do super clean sketches. Because I feel like when I illustrate digitally from a super clean sketch, it just looks super clean and not very painterly. I'm a pretty rough sketcher. I just want to make sure that I have a general idea of the layout and how I want things to look, and then I will make adjustments as I work on color. You can see what that sketch taking me a while to find my way, and I'm still not a 100 percent settled on this. I definitely feel like when I'm sketching, I'm solving a puzzle. Sometimes it takes longer for the pieces to come together than it does other times. I could have edited that out and made it look really nice and neat for you guys. But I really wanted you to see the entire process that I started one place and ended up getting rid of that sketch completely, and ended up someplace different. You might also notice that as I was working I created a couple of one extra sketch layer. That was just for this extra little bit on the side here, because I wasn't a 100 percent certain that I was going to like it. I wanted to have it on another layer, so I get turned off, and I actually think it fills it out really well. I really wanted to be able to show you guys something that's got a lot of layers. We'll be doing a lot of grouping, and we can really play around with a lot of colors and depth on this one. It's going to be super fun. I'm actually not going to work directly from this sketch. Now, I know I said I'm a rough sketcher and I'm. But this is messy even for me. I'm going to go ahead and just clean this up. I'm just going to merge my existing layers. I'm just going to, I just tapped on the layer and then I'm just going to merge down. Now I've got my sketch on one layer. Then I've also still got my rough thumbnails over here, turn off, and then this is my sketch that I'm going to be working from. I'm just going to go ahead and turn the opacity down on this sketch. I usually take it down to around like 25 percent, it usually works for me. Then I'm just going to make a new layer, and I'm going to sketch on top of that now. At this point, I'm just going to be refining everything, and then we're going to be able to start working on our illustration. 4. Building a Color Palette: Right. I got my sketch revised and a little bit more cleanly now. Again, I'm a lazy sketcher so you see I have only indicated the little prickly needles on a couple of these cacti, even though I know they're going to be all over the prickly pears and these guys back here. I just did enough to get a feel for it and remind myself what I needed to do. I'm just going to go into my layers real quick and just delete. This is my original sketch I just deleted, and then back here I've still got my little doodle sketches if I want those, and then I can turn this one on or off if I want to. What I want to do now is just really quickly work on building my color palette for this piece. I know a lot of people just wing it when it comes to color palette, and if that works well for you, awesome. I find that I do a lot better if I do a little bit of planning with my color palette. Otherwise, I'm just sitting around for ever, just messing around with colors and I can never make up my mind. So it's a lot easier for me or if I have some plan, even though the color palette that I start out with, may not necessarily be the exact color palette that I end up with. I still find it's better for me at least to start somewhere instead of just guessing. So for this one, I am going to start with a pallet that's inspired by the natural colors of a cactus and the cactus flowers. But I am going to be more playful with the colors as we progress. So not everything has to be super green. I'm not going for a super realistic look here, so I can be really playful if I want to and really fun. I'm going to turn back to my Pinterest inspiration board for succulents and cacti, just to get a little bit of color inspiration. I'm basically just going to scroll through here real quick, and just take a look at some things that I like. I really love these colors like this pretty bluish green with a little bit of pink and yellow. I love the idea of having some purple and some orange added in there as well, so it doesn't have to be super just like totally green. I'm really going to make this colorful and fun. I'm just going to have a really quick flip through here, and then I'm going to start building a custom color palette. So again, I'm really attracted to like these bright colors, these really pretty purples, and fuchsia, some hot pinks and yellows, I think that's really pretty. I'm going to show you two different ways that you can build a color palette here in Procreate. If you have watched my beginners' Procreate class on keeping a digital sketchbook, I've already done a section there on building custom color palettes. So I'm really not going to go into a whole lot of detail here, and it's actually pretty self-explanatory anyway. So if you have any experience with Procreate, you probably already know how to do this, but I'm also going to show you another way to do it, that's handy if you're going to be exporting your art to Photoshop, or to another program. I'm just going to go ahead and turn my sketch layer off. We don't really need that right now, and I'm just going to be looking at colors over here, and I'm just going to start by going over here, going to my palettes. I'm going to create a new palette. It's already set as my default, and then I'm going to go back over here to my color picker and let's get started thinking about colors. I know for certain that I want to start with a green obviously. So we'll see maybe this guy. I'm just going to go through here and pick some random colors and some blue. Why not? I definitely might be more specific about this. If I was working on a client project, but when I'm just working on something fun like this, I'm just having fun at this point. Just making a mess. I'm just going to choose some colors and then maybe we'll throw in like a really nice bright yellow too. I've got this nice little '80s rainbow palette picked out here, which I think is going to be really fun. Again, I just did this really quickly. So I'm not necessarily married to it. I'm not 100 percent going to use it. It's just going to be a jumping off point, and that's inspired by some of these colors that I like over here. I just totally messed up my pin board, which is fine. Anyways. So I've got my nice little like rainbow unicorn palette over here. This is awesome because I've just got this palette saved now, so I can go back into my palettes here, here's my palette. Let's just go ahead and name it cactus. Done. If I need to switch my palettes out, I know that I can always come back to my cactus palette and make it my default again, and it'll show up right here again, and I can put in as many colors as I want. I will usually like to keep it under 10. Usually under seven if possible, just because if you pick too many colors, again, it's just too confusing. Your work is just going to look crazy. I start with this and then just be playful with it from there. Another thing that you can do with your color palette. So this is awesome. We really love this, but if I go into Photoshop, I can't take this palette with me. All I'm going to take is this layered file. What I can do is I can just make color palette right on my document instead. I'm just going to go to my layers, I'm going to make a new layer and this is going to be where my color palette is going to live, and this is awesome because, if I export a layered PSD file to Photoshop or if I export to any layered file anywhere, I'm going to have this layer right here and it's going to have my color palette on it. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to go back and I'm going to pick a brush, and I'm just going to pick the dry ink brush, I think, because it's pretty solid, I'm want to make sure that I've got a nice solid color. Yeah, it's pretty solid. All I'm going to do is go over here to my palette. I'm just going to pick my colors, I'm just going to scribble a few swatches, and I'm just going to go through here and do this for every single one of these, scribble, scribble, scribble, I'm just keeping my color palette and making swatches. I don't know if we're going to use that red color, but we'll go ahead and leave it there anyway. You can probably do a neater job on this if you wanted to, but this works. I've got my swatches here and now I've just got it on a layer, so I can turn this off whenever I want to. I can bring my sketch layer back up when I'm ready to start working, and then I can just turn this back on, and if I want to pull a color out, all you need to do is just use either my pen or my finger. Use the eyedropper tool and then I'm going to select that color. So I can just do this for all the colors and this is just as easy for me as having this little color palette built over here and again, if I decide that I need to transfer this into Photoshop and do some work over there, I've already got my palette here, so I can work in Photoshop from the same palette and it saves me a little bit of trouble. So we have chosen our color palette, got our sketch ready to go, and now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to learn about adding flat colors and a few different ways to do that. 5. Adding Flat Colors: All right. We've got our color palette setup. I've got it in two places. I have got it over here, under my color selector and then I've also got an extra layer that I created over here that's got all my colors on it. If I ever exported to Photoshop, I would be able to take my palette with me. We're going to go ahead and turn that layer off. Then at this point, let's go ahead because we're going to be doing some flat colors in this video. I'm going to go ahead and just adjust my sketch layer. This is my sketch layer and I want to switch it to multiply because I want to be able to see through it. I'm just going to push the opacity down to about 25 percent so I can still see my sketch, but it's not going to distract from my color. My sketch is not part of my final art, that's why my sketches are so rough, but that's why I'm able to do this. If your sketch is part of your final art, you may not want to adjust the opacity this low. You might want to leave it a little bit higher than this. You just have to play around with that. Okay. We've got this ready. Now, before I show you how I like to block in my flat colors, I want to show you some of my favorite brushes for doing this. I'm going to go ahead and make another new layer, and I'm just going to pick black for this. Let's go ahead and turn off this layer so we just have a blank canvas. I'm going to start by showing you guys some of my favorite native Procreate brushes and then I'll show you some ones that I've purchased that I also love. One of my favorites is this 6B pencil under Sketching, which I've already used for my rough sketches. I actually really like to use it as a block in flat colors too, just because it has a really awesome pencil texture and I can get a rough look when I'm blocking my colors, so I find it to be really useful. Then one of the other brushes that comes with Procreate that I love is the artist's crayon. It's the same thing. It's really awesome for blocking in your flat colors. I love this one because it's got a really awesome crayons, chalky texture to it. If you're looking for a really textural drawing style, this one is. Here, I'm just talking about brushes that I'm using when I'm blocking and flat colors. I'll show you some other brushes that I use as I work on details and some other things. Let's have a quick look through here. I do like the dry brush under painting as well. It's got a really fun painterly texture to it. You get these really nice brush strokes and some variation in color. It can be really fun for blocking and your flat colors. Then from time to time I will use the dry ink brush for blocking in colors, but I'm more likely to use it for details when we get further along in the process. These are four and just my favorite brushes that come with Procreate. But I've also purchased a bunch of brushes that go with Procreate because we just can't get enough of buying brushes. I'm going to post under the your project section, there's going to be a PDF that's going to walk you through my whole process for creating this cactus garden. I'm going to include in that PDF some links to some of my favorite brushes and where you can purchase them. One of my favorite brush packs right now is Lisa Bardot's Gouache pack which you can find on Creative Market. Her brushes just have a really awesome gouache texture. They're so fun. I'll show you a bunch of them as we go through here because I'm going to use quite a few of them to add texture to my work. But one that I really like for laying flat colors is her gouache round brush. I'm just making these brushes really big so you guys can see what they look like. I wouldn't necessarily use them this big. But you can see that this has got a really lovely textured edge. Let me make that a little bigger. Can you see how awesome that textured edges? I love it. It's really great for blocking in flat colors. It's definitely a favorite of mine. Another favorite of mine for blocking in flat colors and this is probably the last one that we'll go over in this class because I could talk about brushes for ever and we've to talk about other stuff. You guys don't want to listen to me talk about brushes for five hours. Anyways, this is from the Maxspack brushes and this one is the paint bristle brush. Say that five times fast. This one, you see a running theme with the brushes that I like to use for my flat colors. You can see it's got a really great texture to it already. You can see paintbrush bristles when you're laying your flat colors here. This one's really fantastic too. I'm going to be using a combination of methods to lay flat colors for this piece. Usually when I'm selecting how I lay in my flat colors, it's just intuitive. I'm just picking what's going to work best for the piece of art that I'm working on. Sometimes it has a lot to do with the mood that I'm into, whether I want really rough textured edges, or smoother edges with texture inside the area that I've selected, so it really just depends. Before I get started laying flat colors on my cactus garden sketch, I'm going to show you a couple of different ways that I use to lay in flat colors and then how I combine those to come up with a lot of different looks. All right, I'm just going get rid of this layer that we were just messing around with, then I'm going to turn my sketch layer back on. For this demo, I think I'm just going to start with this little prickly pear right here in the middle. We'll go ahead and zoom in on it so you can see really well and then I'm just going to make another new layer. This is underneath my sketch layer. Let's go ahead and rename this. You guys are aware of what my layers are because I'm notoriously lazy about not naming my layers and it gets messy quickly. All right. This is our sketch layer and then this is going to be our flats. More the same as flats even though we're going to end up having more layers than them. All right. I'm just going to pick this bright green color. Now, the first way that I like to laying flat colors is just by choosing a brush and just drawing or painting with it. I've already got the Max paint bristle brush selected, so I might just go in here. I'm going to darken this green up just for this demo so you can actually see what's going on. Because I feel like that's a little bit better. I might just use my little bristly edge brush here and I might just block in my flat color like this or I might use maybe the 6B pencil brush or something similarly sketchy. I might just outline it and then just go in and roughly scribble in the color and just leave like some white gabs. This is the first layer of texture that I'm creating when I work. Even this base layer, I want to have some interesting texture and I don't just want it to be completely flat and digital looking. That's why I love these brushes like the paint bristle brush that have these really loose, bristly looks. We can still see the white space in there and have rough edges or if I'm coloring in with a 6B pencil like this, I really just love having it look messy and just leaving some white spots in there. I know it looks crazy right now, but this is not our size. It'll look less crazy when it's zoomed back out. That's just one way that I like to do the flats and again, it just depends on what I'm feeling like when I'm working on stuff. I'm going to show you another way that you can block in colors and then I'm going to show you a way that you can actually combine both of those. I'm just going to scoot over here to this next little prickly pear. I've got our same color selected. The other thing that I do is I use the selection tool to just select the area that I want to fill. We can do that, we'll just go to our selection tool up here and then I'm just going to freehand it. I'm just going to draw around the area that I want to select. If you can see here I've got the little marching ant flying around here and then what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to grab my color from up here. I'm just going to drag it in and boom, I've got a nice clean edged shape here. You can see the difference between the nice clean look over here and the nice more textured look over here. It just depends on the art that you make. What you really dig is going to decide, how you decide you're going to lay flat colors and how you're going to make the art that you're going to make. I'm actually going to undo this one step and I'm going to undo the fill. I've still got this area selected. You can tell because it's got the little stripes in the background and then this area is white. Will have this selected, I can go in and I can select one of my brushes. I'm going to pick the artist crayon brush from Procreate because it's super textured and I love that obviously. Then, well, I've got this selection, I'm just going to go in and just blotch in some of those color. I'm just going to leave some white areas and really give it a nice fun look. Turn off my selection, and now you'll see that I've got a nice crisp edges from the last sewing, but inside I've got a lot of really gorgeous texture. This is just another way that you can add texture to your art. Like I said, it just depends on the art that you want to create and the look that you're going for. I will usually combine these methods. I would usually just go with my intuition, play around a little bit. Sometimes I'll try things and it won't work, so I'll have to switch and use a different method instead. I definitely bounce around in between these a lot. Then, one more thing I want to show you guys before I move on to actually demonstrating how I'm going to block In all this color is, I'm going to show you how to cheat if you want to have a textured edge, but you don't want to take forever coloring something in. Let's just go ahead and pick this little guy. I'm going to go back to my brushes and choose my 6B pencil again and I am just going to rough in this edge. Look at this. I'm just making a scribbly edge on this. You don't have to make a scribbly edge, you can make it a smooth as you want to. This is just another fun way to add texture. When you're doing this technique, you want to make sure you have some nice closed edges. Then I can drag my color, and you can see that it's filled in the center of my shape. Now, let me turn off my sketch later here because there's a reason I don't use this method a whole lot. The reason for that is this little halo right here. It's super easy to fix because all I can do is just go in here. I've got my 6B pencil selected again. I'm just going to scribble it in and then just fix some of these edges. I've got a rough edge here, but then I was also able to quickly fill in using a bucket fill. That's another easy way that you can create texture. I don't use this method a whole lot just because I feel like, it's not a big deal. I'll just on this one piece, but if on every single piece that I'm doing, I have to go in and fill in the little light ghostly line and so my favorite thing ever. Now, there is another way that you can do this. I'm just going to go head in, go back again. I've got my color done in here. I'm going to turn my sketch off again and so you can really see what I'm doing. I've got my border here. I want to fill in this center. I want to do it quickly. I'm going to do my select tool, and then I'm just going to go ahead and select an area right in the middle of what I have selected. Now, from here, I can do the same thing. I can drag the color in, but I will still probably end up with a halo. Instead I'm going to go to the layer, tap on it, fill layer, it's only going to fill what I have selected. Now you'll see that I've got a nice filled shape and I don't have that halo, although I do have a couple areas here on the end. I just want to touch up real quick. There you go. You've got a few different ways that you can start filling in the flat colors on your illustration. Before we get started with that, I want to get you thinking about how you're going to be grouping the different areas of your illustration. I'm a big fan of doing some advanced planning, especially when you're working on something that's got a lot of different layers of things going on. Because Procreate limits the amount of layers that you can have, unlike Photoshop, you need to be thinking in advance of how you're going to be working, how many layers you're going to have, what you're going to group together. As you go through the class, I think that you're going to understand a little bit more why I'm talking so much about this. But for right now, I will just say that as I'm looking at this right now, I'm going to be thinking of probably grouping elements together. I'm probably going to group the foreground elements together. So the prickly pear and then these little stones down here, I'm probably going to have a second layer that's going to have these little side cacti, this barrel cactus back here and maybe this little plants. Then I'm going to have another layer that will have this plant or this big cactus, and then finally I'm going to have a layer that's probably just going to have the bird and some of the little floral elements separately. Then I'll have a separate layer from my background. So I have about five layers, which ought to be fine. If you're curious to know how many layers you've got to work with in a Procreate document, you just go under your Actions menu, go to Canvas, Canvas information, and it's going to tell you that you've got based on the size that you've chosen for your Ps and the DPI, it'll tell you how many layers you have to work with. I've got 38 layers, which is quite a bit. I've only used four so far. I could go crazy putting things on different layers if I wanted to, but I'm going to try to be smart about it. We'll see how well that goes. Probably not very. I do you love working on a lot of layers. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to speed up the video and I'm just going to block in my flat colors. I'm not super worried about color choice at this point because I'm going to tweak it and work with that a little bit and just figure out what works best for me. A song going with the flow at that point and see in where it works best. 6. Adding Color Contrast: In this video, we're going to be adding some color contrast. This is actually where layers are going to come into play and they're going to make my life and hopefully your life a little bit easier. This is where I get to start having fun because I'm going to be playing with color. Everything is going to start looking so green and [inaudible] , we're going to add a lot of contrast. We're going to add some more texture. I'm really just going to jazz things up. I think I'm going to blockchain some blue and some purple and some orange, especially on like the prickly pear and some of the other cacti in the background. This is going to be super fun. Now, the first thing that you might notice is that this is a different color now. I just changed it before I started recording and I'm going to show you guys how I did that real quick just in case you're curious. I've got all my layers here. If I wanted to use my prickly pears and example, here's the layer it's on and I got to select it. Then, I'm just going to go up here and select hue, saturation, and brightness. Then, I can just use my sliders here to tinker with this color a little bit if I want to make it darker or brighter or lighter whenever I want. Then, if I don't want that, I can just reset it and it goes back to how it was. I'm actually going to give it just a tiny bit more of a bluish hue. That's good. Awesome. This is just if you want to adjust your base colors before you got started with anything else, it's a really fun way to do it. I am going to be using a couple of different brushes for this. I want to show you guys one brush you can use that as native to procreate. Then also, brushes that I like to use it or not native to procreate. You don't have to buy tons of brushes to be able to use procreate successfully. The native brushes are really fantastic and there's no reason that you can't make awesome art just using those. I think like a lot of people who make digital art are just addicted to bind brushes. I have purchased a lot of brushes and I have favorites both that are native to procreate and that I've purchased. The first one that I'm going to use is just a native brush. It's the artist crayon, which is under the sketching section. You remember from when we were laying flat, it just will give you like a really pretty texture free overlay. This is a fun option. Then, I'm also going to be using, and I've mentioned this when I was talking about flats. I'm going to be using one of the brushes from Lisa Bardot squash set. Again, I'll be sure to include a link to these in the PDF for this class. I'm just going to use maybe one of her really texture free brushes here. This is a really nice one. This one is a drives scratch brush. It's got a lot of really good texture and it's going to be super fun for this part. I'm probably going to bounce back between these two and I'm adding texture, you'll see both of those things happen. I just colored on my layer. Let me undo that real quick. My goodness, thank goodness for the undo option. Here we are. Just back to our regular flats. Now, I want to show you a couple of options here before I speed things up and start playing the music again. You've really got a few ways that you can add color to a specific layer. I'm still working with our prickly pear layer here. I'm just going to go ahead. I'm just going to select a color that'll be easy to see. Let's do this bright pink. I'm not necessarily going to use this, but I want you to be able to see for the example. The first thing that you can do is you can go to your layers top on it, hit alpha lock. Now when you hit alpha lock, what that means is that everything that you paint is going to be on layer five, which is my layer with my prickly pear. I'm going to go in here, I've got my brush selected. You can see here I'm just painting within the prickly pear. If I tried to paint out here to the side, nothing happens. This is an awesome easy way to make sure that the brush strokes that you're applying or the texture that you apply is only being applied to the area that you want it to be applied to and not everywhere else. Now, if you're like me and you're like, I don't know if I want to pay directly on that layer just yet because I might change my mind 47 times. You can actually do it on a separate layer. I'm going to go ahead and undo this again. Then, this time, what I'm going to do is I am going to just select my layer. Then, I'm going to paint over top of this. I'm going to go in here. I'm going to turn alpha lock off because we don't need that anymore. Tap it again, select. Now what is selected is everything that is on my layer five, which has all of my prickly pear. Now I can make a new layer over this if I want to. Hit my brush icon. Then, when I go back in here, it's basically doing the same thing that alpha lock did. I'm only painting on the prickly pear area. I'm not painting everywhere else. Go ahead and tap the selection icon off. But the bonus to this is that it's on its own layer. I can turn this on or off. I can decide if I like it or if I don't like it. I can delete it, if I don't want it. Let's just swipe and delete it. That's probably the way that I use most often to do things like this. Now another thing that you can do is you can actually use the selection tool itself to highlight a specific area. I'm just going to make a new layer again. I'm on a separate layer for this. I'm going to pick my selection tool. Then, I'm just going to zoom in and we'll just select this area. I'm just going to select this part of prickly pear and take it down a little bit here. Now when I go to my brush, I've just got this one prickly pear that is selected out for color back in here. You see that I have only colored in the area that I select it with my tool. Again, I have this on a separate layer. If I want to, I can turn on and off. When I decide that I like this, all I need to do is tap on this and then merge down. Now, I'll have all the prickly pear on one layer, so I don't have a billion layers going on there. I'm just going to undo that merge. Then of course, if you are feeling foggy and you're not a super worried about your brush strokes being contained within a certain area, you can just wing it and forget it. You just make a new layer here and then you can just start brushing on your texture. If you're cool with it, it's going outside. But that might be a look that you're going for, sometimes that's the look that I'm going for. Then, you just free hand it on here. Then if you wanted to, you can see really gone outside my edges here, which just fun. Then if you wanted to, you could just go in with your erase tool and just erase some of that, neat it up or just make it the form that you want to, just leave it rough. There you go. Those are the couple of ways that I use to add color contrast and another layer of texture to my art. So what I'm going to do now, is I'm going to speed things up a little bit and I'm just going to go through all of my layers here. I'm just going to start adding in some more color contrast and also a little bit of depth. So that the rocks are separated and the bits of the prickly pear are separated a little bit. Our illustration is really going to start to take form at this point. This is where stuff gets really fun and exciting. So let's get started with some color contrast. All right, so we've got a ton of contrast and texture added in, at this point. I think maybe it looks a tiny bit muddy at this point, but we're going to work that out as we work on adding some more texture and some light and then we get in there and add all of our details that's going to make a huge difference too. The only thing that I didn't mess with right now, is my little bird guy right here. Just because I'm not a 100 percent sure what I'm going to end up doing with him in the end, if he's going to be yellow or if he's going to be a gray toned cactus wren. I'll just play that by year, so we'll finish him up at the very end. But you notice that as I was going, I was merging layers, so I still don't have a ton of layers. I did leave a couple of things separate. This pink and orange that I did on the prickly pears, I left it on a separate layer for now so I can adjust it if I want to, because I'm still not a 100 percent certain that I really love it. I do like it though. We might turn it down. We'll see how it turns out as we go. It's all just figuring out how the puzzle pieces fit together as you go along. The other thing that you may have noticed that I did, is I also just roughly blocked in a background while it was added. Here I'll turn it off and back on again. You can see I just added a little indication of some sky in the background, maybe like some sunrise colors back here, left this really pale one way. Then down here I just to added a little bit of like a sandy dirty color. Again, this is something that I might play with and might change at some point. When I block in a background like this, I just like to use like one of these procreate painting brushes, that cover a large area or I will also use maybe some of the larger gouache brushes that I got from Lisa Bardot. Those are really good as well to block in color. Then Max brushes has got some pastel options that are really good if you want to block in some colors in your background. Just anything that you can make the brush gigantic, so you can just really loosely block and paint over and over and over until you get the effect that you're looking for. In the next video, I'm just going to talk about how I'm going to group my layers for moving forward and make my life a little bit easier. Yeah, so hop on over to the next video and let's get started, groupings and layers. 7. Grouping Layers: Before I move on to adding more texture and adding some light and shadow, what I want to do is I want to group my layers together that I want the same things to happen too, because I'm going be using some blending modes during this next portion. I'm going until want to use blending modes, on certain sections of my art, but maybe not on other sections. I'm going to try to be a little bit thoughtful about how I have things grouped together. I'm going to be doing just some merging of layers and then also just creating some groups. This layer down here on the bottom is my background and I'm just going to leave it how it is, now some of these other layers I am going to go ahead and group. To make a group, what you're going to have to do is you are just going to swipe, right, and when you do that, it's going to highlight your layer. Do that for everything that you want to be in a group. This is going to be my large background cactus, this piece right here, and then this barrel cactus, and let's unhighlight that. I've only got two things right here. I'm going to hit this little icon up here with the three little lines. That's going to make myself a new group. I'm going to close that, and I'm going to go ahead and make any new groups that I want to make. These cacti right here, I'm going to leave on their own, but I am in a group, the flowers and the prickly pear. I'm just going to swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe until I got everything I need highlighted, make a group, and then I can close that group down to keep everything together. I've just got to groups that I want to make now. What I usually do is I go ahead and merge my groups, so everything that's in a group gets merged together, that way it's easier for me to work with when I start doing blending modes, but I also like to keep my old group as well, just in case I need to go back in and edit anything like if I want to remove that pink and orange colors from the prickly pears, that's easy to do. What I'm going to do is I'm going to swipe left, I'm going to duplicate my group. This is my original group here, so I'm just going to go ahead and turn it off and I'm also going to lock it. That just means that I'm not going to accidentally mess up and delete it or edit it when I don't want to. Then I'm just going to tap on my new group. I'm going to flatten my image. You'll see here, this is all just one layer now. It's going to be a little bit easier for me to work with and trying to stay organized here. I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm just going to duplicate, turn off the old group lock it, so I can't mess with the top flatten and there we go. This is just a barrel cactus and then these background elements here. If I wanted to mess with anything else I could, now, just for the sake of organization, I'm going to pull my old groups down to the bottom here just to get them all the way. No reason behind that. I can't see them right now anyway there turned off. But if I need them, I can drag them back up to the top. The area that I'm actually working with is going to be here from layer 4 all the way down here to layer 13. This is where I'm going to be focused for now. We're just going to be working on this center section. One thing that I do occasionally run into with procreate, and actually I see occasionally, this has only happened one time so far. That's awesome. That means I'm getting better at managing the amount of layers that I worked with guys where I worked with a ton of them in Photoshop, so that's something that has been an adjustment for me with procreate is just getting used to not being able to use like 200 layers and one piece of wire if I want to. If I was running out of layers, what I would do is I would just duplicate this and then merge all of my layers in a new file. I'm going to show you that real quick. I would just go back to my gallery. Maybe. There we go. I'm back to my gallery, I'm just going to swipe, duplicate this file. Now, I've got two of the same file here. That means that I've got an original artwork here that has all of my original layers in groups and everything, and then if I go back into this layer, I can safely start getting rid of stuff. If I get an error message that says I've maxed out on layers, I can just go in to this group and this group, I can unlock them, I can delete them. You don't need them anymore and get rid of these extra sketch layers. I'm going to keep my original sketch layer, and then if I needed to, I could merge all of these layers if I wanted to and work from there. I still would have my original file with all my layers on it. If I needed to go back and edit anything, I would still have everything here, but I would have a more manageable file that had less layers in it, so I could continue working. Again, it's only happened to me like one time in procreate, but I still think that it's a good thing to know the little work around. In the next video, we're going to start talking about adding more texture and adding a little bit of lights. 8. Texture and Light: In this video, we're going to learn all about adding texture and light to your procreate illustrations. I know you're thinking already, that is a lot of texture. That's crazy. We're adding more texture? Yes, we're going to add more texture. I would say that you can never have enough texture, but that's definitely not true. You can overdo it. You have to learn what the sweet spot is, I guess, for the amount of texture that you want in your work, for how you want it to look. I personally really like to have a lot of texture in my work. I just think that it looks fun and I really just love this painterly sort of Gouache look. The more texture, the better for me. As I'm adding texture at this point, I'm also going to be thinking a little bit about my light source, what might need to be shadowed, and what might need some bright colorful highlights. For this one, I'm just going to say that my light source is in the upper right hand corner. I'll work out my shadows and highlights with that in mind. Keeping in mind that I have a flat illustration style, I'm not going to be super realistic about the shadows and highlights, I'm just going to indicate them with my textures. Just like in Photoshop, I love using blending modes to help me create depth and procreate. It's a bit of playing around to figure out what works best for your style but I'm going to show you what works best for me and then that should give you a starting point to begin with. If we go over here to my layers palette, this is where you're going to find you're blending modes. If I just tap on the little letter right here, this one says N, you see that my blending mode options are divided into neat little categories. Whether I went to darken, lighten, add contrast difference or color, it's all divided. You can figure out what works best for you. I tend to use like three or four of these more often than most. Those are multiply, which I usually just use when I'm turning my sketch layer down a little bit so I can see through it. "Color Burn", I use all the time. Then other ones that I use are lighten options and those options are "Screen" and "Color Dodge". I used those all the time. But you should definitely spend some time playing around and see what works best for you because anytime that you're doing any art, just because something works for me doesn't mean it's going to work for you. It may not work for your style. It's definitely about exploring and seeing what works best for the kind of art that you want to create. I rely often on color burn when I'm adding shadows. Let me just go ahead and show you a trick with this. I'm going to go to my prickly pear. I'm going to make a new layer. In my new layer, I'm going to switch to color burn and I'm going to change the opacity on this later down to about 50 percent. All right. Then I'm going to choose from my "Color Picker", I'm just going to choose a medium gray, just in the middle there. Then for my brushes, I've got the Lisa Bardot Gouache dry scratch brush, maybe let's stick with that for now and see how it works. I'm going to zoom in here among "Color Burn", I've got a gray selected. I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller. I just want to look at some areas where I would want to add some shadow. You'll see what "Color Burn" is doing. As long as I'm using a gray tone, it's basically just making a darker version of the color that it is being put on top of. Remember, I've got this on its own layer. This is not the prickly pear layer, this is the layer on top of it. I'm just roughing in some areas here where I might want to add some shadows to my "Color Burn". Then what I would also do is I would probably go in later and actually do some shadows with some colors instead of just doing this little shitty "Color Burn" method that I'm doing right now. You can see already that we've got some depth, even though it is kind of a cheat, I definitely feel like it works and it's a good place to start. What I usually do is I'll do like a rough layer like this, then I'll go in, I'll make another layer and then we can also make that "Color Burn". I usually do a couple of "Color Burn" layers. I'm still using the Lisa Bardot Gouache brushes. I'm just going to switch to her dry detail brush. Then with that one, I'm just going to go in and just color in a little bit more shadow so I get some more differentiation between each one of the prickly pears. That looks a little bit better already. All right, I'll just do this really quickly. We want to finish this. You get the idea. Everything that I'm doing here is just scribbly and not super specific. I feel like it's easier to have work that looks a little fresher if you're being a little bit looser with it when you're working on it. One of the other things that I like to do with "Color Burn" is I like to add an extra layer of texture if I feel like it needs it. We'll just go do "Color Burn" again, drag our opacity down again, then we've still got a medium gray, but this time I'm going to pick like bristly brush. Let's go to our native procreate brushes. I'm going to pick the dry brush. I love this one because it has a really bristly texture and I really love that in my art. Let's go in here and just [inaudible] it on. I'm actually going to go in here and adjust the opacity back up to a 100 percent so you can see it. I'm not going to leave it like that, but I think it'll be easier for you to see that way. Then I'm going to go back over here to Lisa's Gouache brushes. Let's pick her dry scratch brush because it's also got a really nice paint brushy texture to it. This is another fun way that you can add an extra bit of texture to your illustrations. See? It's look super fine already. We'll leave that layer on there, but let's turn it way down so it's not so distracting. All right, awesome. Let's now take a look at just adding some highlights, and we're going to be doing some similar things. I'm going to show you how to use the screen and dodge options. Then I'm just going to go in and add some lighter colors as well. I'm going to make a new layer again. Then I'm going to pick Lighten, Screen. Again. I'm going to pull this down to about 50 percent. That just seems to be a good number for me where I'm getting the necessary results, but it's not taking away from my art. When I use Screen, I usually just pick a brown tone. Then you can use any of the native brushes, let's do Artists Crayon for this one. All I'm doing here is I'm just going in and just doing some highlight areas, just really roughly. That's always the key here is just to rough things in and not be super-specific. It really doesn't look like much, but it makes a big difference. Let me turn the layer on and off so you can see it. There's the difference. Now let's add a new layer. For this one, I'm going to do a Color Dodge layer, which is again is a lightening layer. We're going to just be adding some more highlight. When I color dodge, I usually use an orangey tone and let's just stick with Artists Crayon for now. We'll just do the same thing. We're going to go on, and we're just going to lighten these areas here, where we might have a highlights from where our light source is coming. Again, I'm not super-specific about this. I'm just playing it lose, doing what feels right. I might go ahead and just make another layer here. This is why I merged my layers before because I start getting layer happy at this point when I'm working with blending modes and adding all sorts of layers of texture, super important. The last thing that I want to do is I'm just going to go through and just do a final pass where I'm just going to add some more lighter or darker colors. Again, this is just a new layer just because if I want to change anything, I can, and I'm just going to go back to my imported brushes, and I'm going to pick Lisa squash dry detail brush this time. This time, let's just go ahead and pick some colors. Just to add some extra interest to our shadows. Get this nice blue color, that might be a little dark, but we can adjust it. We like all the color from layers, though, rough this in. Then we might also want to just do some brighter highlights. I might just pick this color, and I might just make it a brighter yellow, a little bit more saturated, and then we can just go in here. I have a little bit more of this saturated yellow to where our highlights maybe [inaudible]. This is why we love digital art, because we can undo. I've got my pencil tilted on this one, so it's really just swipe it in loosely with the color. Then we could do this for as many of the other colors as we wanted to as well. But it's time for me to get started on the rest of this illustration. I'm actually going to delete all the work that I just did here. Yeah, I'm going to delete all this and then I'm just going to go through the same blending modes and play around with some different brushes. Then we'll see where we're at at the end of this. Then after those, there's just one more step of adding final details, and we're ready to go. Before you start on this, just to remember, if you're unsure, make a new layer. If it isn't working, you can get rid of it. I feel like layers make it so easy to experiment with your work. You don't have to worry about a mass or anything like you do if you're working with paints or anything like that. If I don't like this, I can turn the layer off, I can delete the layer, and I can try something different. That's one of the things I love about procreate and creating digitally. I'm going to speed stuff up and let's get started on a lot of texture. 9. Final Details: Alright, so we're all done adding texture and light and shadow. Now in this video, we're going to go into some final details, so I may add just some more shading and some highlights as I go through because as you work on these last details, it becomes apparent that you need some more shadows and highlights to make everything read correctly. You notice that when I was doing this, I went ahead and changed the color of our little bird to blue; I just thought that it made him really stand out against a lot of pinks and oranges and yellows that we had going on here, he's really cute and then to cheat, because I'd already added some texture and some light to the background. I just dragged the little bird layer underneath a couple of my texture layers for these background pieces and setup having to make new layers and do it all again, so there you go. Let's make a new layer; I'm just going to do a single layer for all of my details at this point and normally I use two brushes to add in details. In this case, the details that we need to add in if we turn the sketch back on, our sketch layer back on. We need to enter in the needles on the individual pieces of cactus; I've got some flowers I need add and over here, details on the flower and texture on this plant back here. Just basically a lot of little stuff, and the way that I'm going to do it is I'm going to use two brushes to do that, both of them are native to procreate; they're really awesome. 6B pencil, you know I love it; I've been using it a lot for this entire project, so I'm going to be using the 6B pencil for a lot of my details and then I'm also going to be using under inking, the dry ink brush. Let me just zoom in a little bit so you can see how awesome the dry ink brush is. It is just got this really fantastic texture and if you've taken my drawing delightful animals in photoshop class, you know I love a texture brush like this for detail. I just think that it adds an extra little bit of magic, it's so good. What I'm going to do now is we're just going to go back and I'm going to speed things up here so we can get finished up, and I'm just going to add in all of the rest of the little details and then if I need to, I'm going to go back in and add another layer of highlight and shooting wherever I might need to, so let's get going. That's a wrap for this piece. I just want to show you a couple of things that I did here at the end, so I'm going to turn off the layers that I added. This is what it looked like after all of our texture was added in, and then this layer is olive; my details, so all of the little needles, flower details, the little textural details back here are all added and the little flowers added here as well. Once I got this done, I felt a little bit like it was too much; it was a little too busy, it's actually pretty busy anyway, so I added another layer and I tone down some of the background elements. Let me skip that over so you can see. This is what I did look like, and then this is what it looks like when it's toned down a little bit because I really wanted the prickly pear and the little blue bird to stand out, so I toned everything else down and made our really nice textural drawing. Alright guys, we are done with my demo and in the next video, I'm just going to talk you through your project for this class. Happy drawing. 10. Your Project: Your Project for this class is to draw your own cactus garden and procreate it using the techniques I've demonstrated. Make it as simple or as complex as you'd like. Look into the Your Project section of this class to find a simple walk-through PDF, that includes my color palette and links to my favorite brushes. For your reference, here is a quick recap of the process. Start with your rough sketch; then choose your color palette; block in your flat colors; add color contrast; add texture and light, and lastly add final details. Share your project here so we can all see the amazing work you've done. If you're sharing to Instagram, don't forget to tag me @stephphfizercoleman, and use the #stephfcskillshare; so your work can be found by other students. Have fun and happy drawing.